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Prison of fear or desert of not knowing

There is this prison of fear, a cage and it surrounds me and it says ‘you can never drink again!’ and it frightens me. And then, when I change my perspective and say: ‘Pfffff, lucky me, I don’t ever have to drink again!’ all the fear is gone at once.

Secondly: what is left is a white sort of desert of nothingness and I don’t know what the heck to do with my life. As Icemen18 said yesterday: ‘I had a sober problem called life.‘ I have that. Well, not as negative as it could be perceived by that statement (and Iceman18 rewrote it to a statement that is easier to understand correctly) but I’ll go with the ‘problem called life’ because that for me has the directness to it that explains to me very well where the issue lies.

I have a problem and it is called life. My solution was to drown me in alcohol, so life did not hurt. Now I do not drown myself anymore I need to look for ways of dealing with life. Don’t get me wrong, not interested in jumping of a high building here. Unfortunately I don’t believe that its easier being dead either. I sat at my mothers deathbed and I had a little peek around the corner of life; (no) need to worry, it continues.

So yes, I feel pressured in the need to deal with my shit, just in order to literally not come back as a pollen of grass in, say an English garden: getting cut off and cut off and cut off over and over again.

And all of that is of no importance because my life is here and it is not there where I am not. So……..

I’ll tell you: I don’t know. Have no clue. So today I spent not knowing. And then when I finally got comfortable with that the voice said: you just need to write. So the rest of my bath time I wondered: is that one of the addict bingo words or if I should truly do that?

My ayahuasca spirit once said: ‘Life was never meant to be a burden. You need to understand that.’ But I don’t. Not yet. Not how I live right now. I feel I keep myself in a prison of fear because that is more comfortable than letting go.

I’m at a loss here (yes, yes, I know, AA, higher power… but those are exactly the buttons that have been pushed too much in a very wrong way.) By now I feel I have become a perfect example of an addict struggling with life.

These (random) cuties tell it very well:

Well, what did they say about addiction? Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results? Yes. Check! That would be me. Time to learn something, somewhere, somehow.

4 thoughts on “Prison of fear or desert of not knowing”

I got sober at the age of 32. I am now 62. There is no way at the age of 32, 42, or even 52 I could have predicted my current life circumstances. I have always taken that as evidence that if I look 10 years into the future, there is no way to predict where I will be then either. I have come to enjoy being on the path – the road – or, in recovery parlance, it’s a process not an event.

In sobriety, I have operated on the assumption that I could either try something and succeed/fail or not try something and wonder what it would have been like had I tried it. I remember starting off thinking that I do not always know what I want to do, but I know what I don’t want to do.

An exercise I have my student advisees complete is to list 10 ideal careers/jobs/things to do. We then discuss how those can be morphed into a single path. If one views life as a process, and not that my dream job/career/living circumstance is going to appear tomorrow, then there is road to start heading down toward some ideals. I also enjoy that the road has twists, turns, detours, and dead ends.

Thank you Robert. :-). I need to get back there were I enjoy the twists and the turns and the detours and possibly the dead ends as well. It’s just (?) that I am so very, very tired of doing it all by myself. Going round and round and round in circles I have created. Tired of doing it by myself + not trusting others to help me -> tired. Blablabla. Well I guess I need to start to take care of myself again. I guess I let go because it was easy-ish. Less online time. More sleep time. More anything but sitting still time. :-). I am happy that you are happy that you quit. I guess I should be proud of what I did, it’s just all frustrating that life’s issues pop up so clearly when sober. Well, might as well get in there… 🙂
Thank you, regards, Feeling.